Title text: Really, they'd be rushing around collecting revisions to go into the next scheduled quarterly public data update, not publishing them immediately, but you have to embellish things a little for Hollywood.

"…and somebody tell OpenStreetMap that they will need to dissect and discard a lot of the street data!"

Scene 3, our hero makes a stern statement about how we always knew this day was coming, and begins issuing a broad array of competent orders... put an aerial geographic survey on standby, call seismic stations on the opposite side of the world, to see if they detect the seismic echo. Alert Volcanoligists to cancel their vacation plans. Make sure the airport and harbor weather reporting stations are wired to keep reporting in real time, right up until the moment that the tsunami kills them. And get him a personal AWACS plane with an uplink to the major scientific database servers.

In Scene 4, his boss, the chief Science Advisor, tells him to stand down, stop making a fuss, and allow the rescue workers to go in first. Our hero makes a passionate speech about the importance of up-to-the-minute long-term rainfall predictions to Oregonian Farmers on the far side of the mountains, and something about tsunamis transporting illegal mass quantities of supermarket dairy into Canada.

in Scene 5, our hero disobeys orders, stages a mutiny, and coordinates dozens of risk-taking graduate students as they romantically endanger themselves and others to get the data.

Scene 6, Vancouver Island sinks into the sea, and some power-hungry attorney in the State Department files a briefing with Canada, claiming that several hundred square miles of Exclusive Economic Zones in the Pacific now belong to the US.

And in Scene 7, our heroic protagonist gets his AWACS plane into the air above Vancouver, where a dying grad student manages to transmit the final piece of data proving that the tallest rock on Vancouver Island has re-emerged above the tsunami, thus invalidating the State Department's power grab.

and in Scene 8, the epilogue, relief convoys begin to arrive, making key use of meticulously updated maps showing which bridges and InterStates don't exist anymore. Beautiful shots as a farmer battling a drought succeeds in his gamble that a major increase in available irrigation water will occur over the next three months...

We science/resources folk mapping the Wildfires each day.... we actually do this as described in the cartoon.Seriously, we have infrared mapping crew in a helicopter, and produce new GIS outlines each morning.

chenille wrote:Speaking of funnel clouds, if you really want a Hollywood disaster movie that is all about rushing to collect data, that was Twister.

Indeed, I remember a sort of similar occurrence last year, with a team driving the radar trucks across the US Gulf coast, just to get the precious data from the eye of a hurricane. That might have made a nice story.